


Fraternizing with the Enemy

by Philosopher_King



Series: Whatever is done from love [8]
Category: Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Anal Fingering, Anal Sex, Angst and Porn, Bottom Thor, Bottoming from the Top, Discussions about sex and power, Hand Jobs, I hesitate to say "unsafe" because these are gods, Let's go with that, M/M, Mild restraint kink, Plot? Well Maybe Plot, Porn with Feelings, Porn with minimal Plot, References to Rape/Non-Con, References to suicide attempt/suicidal thinking, Sex is always about power, Sibling Incest, Top Loki, Topping from the Bottom, Unrealistic Sex, What does it mean to top anyway?, pwmp, unprotected sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-11
Updated: 2016-05-11
Packaged: 2018-06-07 18:33:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6819373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during "Thor: The Dark World."  After Thor goes to free Loki from prison and before they rendezvous with their co-conspirators, they revisit what they once were to each other, and try (painfully and indirectly, of course) to figure out what they are to each other now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fraternizing with the Enemy

**Author's Note:**

> As its placement in the series would suggest, this work is a sequel to my other Thorki fics, and even makes some explicit references to the events of [The Tree of Knowledge](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6209017), but everything should be sufficiently explained in context that it's not absolutely necessary to read the others in order to understand this. And because this is, as usual, set in the same timeline as all my other fics, there are also some references to things from my (in-progress) Loki-in-the-Void fic [The Abyss Gazes Also](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5236796/chapters/12078722), but again, they should be pretty self-explanatory, though they might be given some depth and resonance by familiarity with the rest of the story.
> 
> In case anyone wonders about all the gambling/card-playing metaphors -- I'm just assuming they play card games in Asgard, though I don't use any game-specific terms.

Thor’s stomach was in knots as he made his way down to the dungeons.  He had not seen Loki in a year—more than a year, now.  Not since he had brought his brother back from Midgard, gagged and in chains.  _He is not my brother anymore,_ Thor told himself.  _He has shown that clearly enough._

He motioned to the guards standing at attention outside the doors to the dungeons, and with the pull of some hidden lever, the doors swung open.  He murmured to the guard who stood just inside the door that he and his companion should step outside, because Thor wished to speak to the prisoner in private.  The two guards bowed briskly and left, and then the doors swung closed, leaving Thor alone with the man who had been his brother.

As he approached Loki’s cell, he could see the comforts that Frigga had arranged to have brought to him: a feather bed, a velvet-covered armchair, a stack of books in the corner, a table with a bowl of fruit and a flask of wine.  Loki must have heard his voice or his footsteps, because he was standing, walking toward the barrier, his hands clasped behind his back, a savage glint in his eyes.  “Thor,” he said; he turned the name alone into an accusation.  “After all this time, and now you come to visit me.”  He leaned forward, his eyes burning their hate into Thor’s so fiercely that he had to look away.  _“Why?”_ he breathed.  “Have you come to gloat?  To mock?”

When Thor averted his gaze from Loki’s face and looked back at the furniture in his cell, he realized that something looked wrong.  He found that he couldn’t focus his eyes on anything; it all looked oddly blurry, like the out-of-focus background scenery of a memory or a dream.  He looked back at Loki, at the unalloyed hate in his eyes, and realized that it looked hollow.  Not quite real, in a way that could not be explained by mere pretense.

Thor had not often called Loki’s bluffs, over the course of their lives; there were only three memorable instances when he had attempted it.  The most recent had been atop Stark Tower in Midgard; an outside observer might have described Thor’s action as “appealing to Loki’s better nature,” but Thor himself had thought of it as trying to call Loki’s bluff.  But Loki had not been bluffing, as the knife he had put in Thor’s side attested all too clearly.  The time before, though, when Thor had challenged Loki’s story that the Destroyer was only enforcing Thor’s banishment at Odin’s command— _“You’re a talented liar, brother, always have been”—_ he had proved to be right.  And the time before that…

Thor decided it was worth a fourth try.  “Loki, enough,” he said sternly, meeting Loki’s eyes again with a steady gaze.  Just as a successful bluff requires the appearance of calm confidence and unshakable knowledge, so does successfully calling one out.  “No more illusions.”

Loki’s eyes widened, and his mouth fell open slightly.  Then he closed his eyes and his image melted away, along with the blurry-edged furniture.

The scene that replaced it hit Thor like another knife to the gut—though he could not say it surprised him.  All of the furniture (quite solid and determinate now) was in pieces, scattered across the floor of the cell.  Shards of glass and smears of dark liquid on the floor showed where the wine flask and, it appeared, an ink bottle had shattered; black smudges on the wall indicated where Loki had thrown things against it, or battered at it with ink-stained hands.  He had even torn apart the books—oddly enough, that struck at Thor’s heart more than anything else.  There had been a time when Loki would have been scandalized at the very idea of damaging a book (or “desecrating,” as he might have said), when he had lectured Thor warningly not to fold down or wrinkle the pages before reluctantly lending him one of his own books, and had berated him viciously for spilling tea on one.  It said much that even the books had not been spared from the violence of Loki’s grief-stricken rage.

As for Loki himself: he was sitting on the floor with his back against the rear wall of the cell, barefoot, with one leg stretched out in front of him and the other one bent under it.  There was a cut on the ball of Loki’s outstretched foot—he must have stepped on a shard of glass—and the sole was stained with blood and ink.  His face was pale and drawn, his hollow eyes ringed with bruise-like shadows; his hair, usually carefully straightened and slicked back, was tousled and wild, and had been abandoned to its natural frizzy curls.  “Now you see me, brother,” he said dully, a half-hearted sneer lifting the corner of his mouth.

Thor struggled to maintain his stern, dispassionate expression.  He walked around to the side of the cell, where he could read Loki’s face more clearly, pausing a moment to close his eyes and breathe deeply through his nose while he was passing behind the pillar at the corner between the two transparent barriers, and Loki could not see him.  He re-emerged stony-faced as ever, and Loki followed him with those darkened, hollow eyes.  Now that he was standing closer, he could see that Loki’s eyelids were red and swollen with weeping.  “Did she suffer?” Loki asked hopelessly.

 _Yes,_ Thor wanted to say, cruelly; and at the same time he wanted to say _No,_ to reassure, to console.  Instead he said coldly, “I did not come here to share our grief.  Instead I offer you the chance of a far richer sacrament.”

Loki tilted his head and narrowed his eyes.  “Go on.”

“I know you seek vengeance as much as I do.  Help me escape Asgard and I will grant it to you: vengeance.  And afterward this cell.”

Loki looked away for a moment, perhaps surveying the tableau of devastation before him—the bare white floor now littered with torn-out pages and jagged fragments of wood—then turned back toward Thor and gave him a joyless smile and the merest ghost of a laugh.  “You must be truly desperate, to come to me for help,” he said, taking on a hint of the mocking tone Thor knew all too well.  _“The humans think us immortal,”_ he could hear that mocking voice saying.  _“Shall we test that?”_

Thor turned and paced away from Loki, willing himself to think only of the mission at hand.  “What makes you think you can trust me?” Loki’s sharp voice called after him.

“I don’t,” Thor said bluntly, not looking at his once-brother.  But then he turned back toward him, and his voice was softer when he added, “Mother did.”

Loki’s eyes were hard to look at: the pain in them was raw and ugly, and the reddened flesh around them made their pale crystal green— _like a lake hidden under a sheet of ice,_ Thor had once thought—look more like the blue-green of the ocean.  More like hers.

Thor trained his voice back to hardness as he continued: “And you should know that when we fought each other in the past, I did so with the hope that my brother was still in there, somewhere.  That hope no longer exists to protect you.”  Thor’s eyes, when they met Loki’s, were hard as stone; their clear blue, usually as warm as a sunlit summer sky, now seemed more like the reflection of sky in polished steel.  “If you betray me, I will kill you.”

“Hmmm,” Loki said with the shadow of a sly smile.  Then he leaned forward, his smile curving ever so slightly higher, and asked, “When do we start?”

Thor was grieved, but hardly shocked, at the equanimity—the _joy,_ even—with which Loki responded to his threat.  “Are you so eager for death?” Thor asked softly.

“Are you so eager for betrayal?” Loki returned mildly, with a wicked glint in his eyes.

“It is a risk I must take,” Thor said gravely.  “The alternative is far worse.”

Loki smiled again; Thor could tell he was aiming for slyly humorous, but the depth of unspoken pain and bitterness that he could see through the humorous veneer turned his stomach.  “And killing me—that, too, is a risk you must take?”

Thor’s own small smile had no humor in it at all; it wore its sadness plainly.  “Did you not once tell me that I must learn to make sacrifices if I am to become a king?”

“Ah, then killing me would be a sacrifice for you?”  As Loki’s smile grew broader, and the pain and bitterness were joined by half-pleased surprise and a kind of desperate triumph, the sick feeling in Thor’s stomach deepened.

 _If only you knew how much,_ he wanted to say.  _I don’t know if I_ have _yet learned how to sacrifice that much._ “Yes,” was all he said.

“Well, then,” said Loki, letting the triumph dominate his terrible smile.  “I can die content, knowing that my death is not your victory.”

“I hope you will not take it as an _incentive_ to betray me,” Thor said.  The words might well have been a jest, but his alarm was quite real.

Loki laughed; the sound was as full of badly concealed pain as his smile.  “Do not worry; I am not _that_ eager to die.”  His lip curled with a sudden impulse of cruelty.  “Not anymore,” he added, his tone deliberately light: a casual twist of the knife in Thor’s heart.

“I am glad to hear it,” said Thor, swallowing his nausea and mimicking Loki’s air of false lightness.

Loki narrowed his eyes; he could sense that he had touched a nerve, and wanted to keep pressing on it for as long as he could elicit pain.  “You know what it is not to fear death in battle, because you believe you will be rewarded with the happiness of Valhalla.  But you do not know what it is not to fear death—to crave it, even—when you have no hope of such a reward.”

Loki knew all too well how to inflict pain on his brother.  Thor had to bite his tongue this time to keep himself from saying what he wanted to say: _Return to me, and you will have more than the hope of Valhalla.  Return to me, and we shall fall fighting side by side in glorious battle some three thousand years hence.  Return to me, and we shall die in our sleep in venerable old age, wrapped in each other’s arms; and Hela herself will give us over to the Valkyries, in recognition of our valor in battles past._ “No,” he said instead.

“That is just as well,” said Loki after a moment’s consideration.  “Keep threatening your enemies with inglorious death.  You should never have to imagine anything worse.”

“You need not be my enemy, Loki,” Thor said patiently, deliberately ignoring the implications of Loki’s last sentence.

“‘Need not,’” Loki repeated thoughtfully.  “There is much I could say about that choice of words… but I don’t suppose we have time for a lengthy philosophical discussion about the species of possibility and necessity.”

“No,” Thor said again, shortly.  He pressed his hand to a sensor pad on the wall next to Loki’s cell, and the magical barrier dissolved.  Thor was one of only three people whose handprint could have opened the cell; Odin and Heimdall were the others.  In theory, he supposed, he could have sent Heimdall to release Loki and found some other way to distract Odin’s attention; but he had wished to explain his plan to Loki himself.  Among other reasons.

Loki did not stand up immediately when the barrier vanished, so Thor walked through the cell to where Loki sat and offered his hand to help him rise.  Loki stared at Thor’s hand for a moment, looking vaguely insulted, but then took it and let Thor pull him to his feet.  Thor tugged on Loki’s hand so that once he was standing, their faces were just a little too close; Loki met Thor’s eyes, looking surprised and a bit wary.  Thor’s gaze broke away from Loki’s and wandered instead down to his lips.  He could not have said whether, during the moment he hesitated, he was fighting the impulse that overtook him next, or simply waiting for the overpowering wave to break.  Either way: after a moment’s pause, he pulled Loki toward him with their still-clasped right hands, placed his left hand behind Loki’s neck, and kissed him with all the pent-up hunger of two years apart.  Loki froze, startled, for just a moment; but then he returned the kiss with no less hunger.

When they broke apart, Loki laughed with somewhat manic delight.  “A year and more I’ve been here, without a glimpse of you, and _that_ is how you greet me?”

“We have both changed much, I know,” Thor answered, his voice thick.  “But some things do not change.”

Thor’s words sparked a painful memory— _“I have changed”; “So have I”_ —and they seemed to call up the same memory in Loki, because he asked tauntingly: “Ah, but what has become of that mortal woman you were so taken with?”

Thor gritted his teeth.  “She is here,” he answered.  “The Aether—a weapon of the Dark Elves—has somehow taken possession of her body.  Only Malekith can—”

Loki held up a hand to cut off Thor’s explanation.  “So, you will enjoy your mortal now, while she is still young and lovely, knowing that in—what?—some thirty years’ time I will still be here, waiting for you.”

Thor shook his head, taken aback.  “Just the opposite,” he said, sounding surprised.  “She will still be here in a week, or a year, if the Realms still stand.  But you—you might leave me tomorrow.”

“Leave you?” Loki asked, faintly scornful.  “You mean, you might have to kill me for my betrayal?”

“That; or you might simply vanish.”  Thor gave a small, rueful smile.  “I may be foolish enough to fall for your tricks, but I am not so foolish as to overestimate myself, or underestimate you.”

Loki chuckled slyly.  “Are you trying to seduce me with flattery?” he asked, his voice low, almost a purr.

Thor wasn’t sure what answer would be least likely to provoke Loki’s ire.  “Only if you want me to be,” he replied, after a moment’s deliberation.

Loki laughed again, at last with what sounded like genuine delight.  “A remarkably politic answer!  We’ll make a diplomat of you yet.  Yes, Thor; I want you to seduce me.  Seduce me as though I’ll leave you tomorrow, and tonight is all you’ll ever have.”  He paused.  “Or is it ‘this afternoon’?”

Thor’s mouth quirked into a smile; perhaps his quick-witted, mercurial brother was, after all, still in there, somewhere.  “It is afternoon, yes.”

“And how long _do_ we have?” Loki asked, with undeniable mischief in his eyes.

Thor’s plan for Sif to retrieve Jane relied on her accompanying the guards who brought the evening meal, so they would not need to rendezvous with their accomplices until then.  “Two hours,” Thor answered.

“Well, then: seduce quickly, brother,” Loki said silkily.

Thor was tempted just to grab him and pull him roughly into another kiss; but if Loki wanted seduction, seduction it would be.  As he had done the first time they had kissed (the second time, strictly speaking; but the first time they had _truly_ kissed, with full knowledge of what it signified)—the first of the three times Thor had called Loki’s bluff—Thor reached up to trace the lines of Loki’s face with his fingers.  All the bones were sharper: the edge of his jaw was like the blade of one of his knives, and his cheekbones stood out starkly from the deepened hollows of his cheeks and his eyes.  Loki had grown thinner, harder, sharper during his year in prison and his year in the Void; Thor could have felt it with his hands alone even if he had not already seen it with his eyes.  But his hands, too, could have told him that this was the face that had once been his brother’s, even if he no longer had eyes.

As he had done years before, Thor let his thumb linger on the distinctive bony arch of Loki’s nose.  He remembered how Loki had complained about it in their youth: “It makes me look like a Frost Giant,” he had lamented once, rubbing it vigorously while peering at himself in a mirror.

“What do you mean?” Thor had responded, puzzled.  Loki’s nose was not blue and did not turn his eyes red, and Thor was not sure what else could make him look like a Frost Giant.

“You know how all the Frost Giants in the picture books we read as children had those big curved noses, with the hook near the top?”  He had gripped the hook in the bone of his own nose to underline his point.

Thor knew what Loki meant, now that he was pointing it out, but he never would have remarked on it himself.  It had occurred to him that there was probably a mutually reinforcing connection between being unhappy with a part of one’s own body and noticing it in others.

Now, centuries later, as Thor’s touch dwelt on that little curve of bone in Loki’s nose, he thought of his old complaint—and he recalled Laufey’s face, looming down from the throne as Thor demanded answers.  Laufey, he realized, had had that same long nose with the same bony arch; the same sharp jawline and pointed chin; the same high, pronounced cheekbones shadowing hollow cheeks.  Loki’s unusual facial structure, so different from the rest of his family’s, at last had an explanation.

Loki noticed where Thor’s fingers had stopped; and he, too, must have remembered what he used to say about his nose.  He pulled his face back sharply, away from Thor’s exploring touch, and asked in a flat, harsh voice, “Are you so sure you want to sleep with a Frost Giant?”  His false laugh was just a bit too loud, too shrill.  “It’s not what is usually meant by ‘fraternizing with the enemy’… but since you used to think you were fucking your brother, perhaps ‘fraternizing’ is the right word after all.”  He spat out the obscenity with a scornful curl of his lip.

Thor lowered his hands slowly and searched Loki’s face with his eyes.  “It is not because of the circumstances of your birth that I no longer call you brother,” he said at last.

“No?” Loki asked, raising his eyebrows.  “Why, then?”

“You tried to kill me—several times.  That indicated to me quite clearly that the bonds of brotherhood no longer held between us.”

Loki’s laugh was again too shrill, but held a kind of wild delight.  “So you are willing to sleep with someone who has tried to kill you, but not to call him brother.”

“Yes,” Thor replied, as if it should be obvious.

“And why is that?” Loki asked with amused curiosity.

“Because love is not required for sex,” Thor said.

Loki looked stunned for a moment, and took a small step back.  Then a smile filled with that same eerie, mad delight spread slowly across his face, accentuating the gauntness of his cheeks, making him look almost like a grinning skull.  “So, Thor: you have learned, after all, to be cruel.”

For a moment, Thor wanted to take his words back.  _I meant only that I know now that you do not love me, not that I no longer love you,_ he might have said.  But he knew they were still playing a game of knowledge and power, and he did not wish to show his hand any more than necessary—surely not to betray a weakness—or to lose the advantage he had just gained.  So he played along.  “Since I was taught by the very best, I should hope I would have learned eventually,” he said dryly.

Loki’s smile turned mischievous and coy, though there was still something wrong in his eyes—something sick, sad, and haunted.  “And the flattery continues!” he exclaimed, trying to sound pleased and only half succeeding.  “I can feel my resistance crumbling already,” he said, putting on the huskiness of lust.  He stepped forward again to close the distance between them, draped his arms loosely over Thor’s shoulders, and placed a light, teasing kiss at the corner of his mouth.  “Which is just as well,” he murmured, keeping his lips tantalizingly close to Thor’s, “because we’re short on time.”

Thor pressed forward, trying to capture Loki’s mouth again, but Loki only let their lips brush lightly before he pulled back again and placed a cautionary finger over Thor’s lips.  “Perhaps we should continue this somewhere else,” he whispered in a conspiratorial tone, glancing around at the broken furniture strewn throughout the cell.

“Yes,” Thor agreed; his voice actually was rough with the lust that Loki had only been pretending to.

“Forgive me for interrupting this scene with a practical question,” Loki said, suddenly entirely matter-of-fact.  “Where is my armor?  I cannot very well fight the Dark Elves in my pajamas.”

Thor blinked, taking a moment to process the question.  “It’s in your old rooms,” he said.

“Very good,” said Loki.  “Then shall we proceed to your bedchamber, since it is just down the hall?”  Thor paused again, his brain still working slowly, and Loki added, unnecessarily and with a touch of sadistic glee, “And I’m sure my own bed has been under dust sheets since my untimely death.”

Thor ignored Loki’s last comment, though it did succeed in abating his lust temporarily.  “We need to get you out past the guards,” he said.  “I’ll just walk out normally, and you make yourself invisible and follow close behind me.  And you’ll have to—”

“—cast an illusion so that it looks like I’m still in my cell, yes, yes,” Loki finished impatiently.  “Did you think I’ve never escaped from prison before?”

“Well, it has been a while,” Thor said, somewhat abashed.  He decided that Loki’s release amid the chaos of the attack on the Helicarrier did not really count.

“Not as long as you might think,” Loki retorted.

“Oh?”

“I had an interesting year, after my fall,” Loki said airily.

Thor decided it was not the time to inquire.  “You’ll need to preserve the illusion until we can get Jane out,” he warned.

“Thor, are you suggesting that I can’t maintain a simple illusion while in the throes of passion?” Loki scoffed.  “I’m wounded.  Didn’t I manage to shield us from Heimdall for all those years?”

“Of course,” Thor said placatingly.

Loki created a double who was sitting listlessly against the wall as Loki had been doing when he revealed himself to Thor.  Then he began to walk across the floor of the cell—limping slightly, heedless of the broken glass beneath his bare feet—toward the front edge, where the barrier had been.  Thor noticed the bloody footprints he was leaving behind him, and with a small wince, he said, “Loki, wait.”  Loki turned around, looking puzzled and a bit impatient.  “Your foot,” Thor said.

“Oh,” said Loki, looking down with faint surprise, as if he had only just noticed it.  He picked up his injured foot, balancing a little unsteadily on the other, and Thor went to offer support.  Gripping Thor’s shoulder for balance, Loki cast a quick healing spell on the upturned sole of his foot, leaving only the stain from where it had been bleeding previously.

They walked down the stone steps from the raised floor of the cell to the hallway outside, and Thor pressed his hand again to the sensor pad on the wall, replacing the enchanted barrier.  Loki followed him until they stood before the double doors out of the dungeon, then Thor nodded at him, Loki vanished, Thor pressed his hand to another sensor, and the doors swung open.  Thor marched briskly out of the dungeons, nodding curtly to the guards waiting outside the doors, and keeping his face stormy, as if he had just had the kind of frustratingly unproductive conversation with Loki that they might have expected.  As he left, two of the guards resumed their position inside the dungeon.

Thor held his breath as they walked away, waiting for the guards to notice that something was wrong, that Loki was not really there, and to burst back out of the dungeon, sounding the alarm.  But all was quiet, save for his own footsteps, echoing through the stone corridors.  When they had turned a corner, and were out of the sight and hearing of the guards posted outside the dungeon doors, Thor reached a hand behind him to make sure Loki was still following him.  His hand brushed Loki’s side, and Loki reappeared, looking irritable.

“Yes, Thor, I’m still here,” he said impatiently.  “Did you really think I’d try to run off _now?”_

“I don’t know,” Thor muttered back, equally irritable.  “Keep your voice down, and make yourself invisible again as soon as you hear anyone approaching.”

Loki did have to go invisible again, once: as they neared Thor’s chambers, they encountered a pair of maids who (fortunately) announced their presence before they came into view by chatting with each other in low voices.  Then the maids disappeared around a corner, and Thor opened the door into his room, grabbing Loki’s arm so that he became visible again (he had to grope around a bit, but he found the arm eventually), pulled him inside, and closed the door heavily by slamming Loki’s back against it while kissing him fiercely.

Loki growled and then laughed into his mouth, but he kissed back just as fiercely.  Thor was still gripping one of Loki’s arms, and now he seized the other, pinning him against the door.  Their bodies were pressed together, Thor’s hardening cock pushing against Loki’s thigh, Loki’s starting to stir against Thor’s lower belly.

When they parted for air, Loki, still panting a little, smiled slyly and said, “So much for seduction, eh, brother?”

 _Brother—_ the word, on Loki’s kiss-reddened lips, still stirred something strange and perverse in Thor’s blood, even as he wanted to tell Loki to stop calling him that: he was not Thor’s brother; the dagger in his side had proved that beyond all doubt.  But it was so intoxicating to pretend that he let it go.  “There’s no time,” was all he said.

“Very well,” said Loki with a shrug and a wicked grin.  “Maybe next time.”

Those words kindled a flickering hope in Thor’s heart; it seemed to jump into his throat as he pulled Loki toward him to kiss him again, and steered them through the inner doorway into his bedchamber.  He let go of Loki’s arms only long enough to tear through the light fabric of his shirt—“I suppose I wasn’t planning to wear that again,” Loki quipped—then seized him again and pushed him onto the bed.  Loki reached up, his arms still in Thor’s grip, to fumble at the fastening of the black cape that Thor wore over his armor.  Thor released Loki again, reluctantly, to swiftly remove his cape, his vambraces and breastplate (he had thought it best not to approach Loki unprotected), and the leather tunic underneath.  Then he grabbed Loki’s wrists once more, pulled his arms up over his head, and secured both slender wrists with his left hand, leaving his right hand free.

Thor’s eyes roamed hungrily over Loki’s body, stretched out invitingly before him.  He was still so beautiful, even as pale and thin and tired-looking as he was.  From the glinting green eyes, dark with his arousal, that stared a faintly taunting challenge up at Thor, to the severe yet somehow delicate lines of his face, the wiry arms and leanly muscled chest, the slender waist and tapering hips—all of it was still beautiful.  With his outstretched hand still pinning Loki’s wrists, Thor let himself wander down Loki’s body, leaving gentle kisses along the edge of his jaw and the side of his neck—Loki sighed and lifted his chin, offering more of his slim pale neck to Thor’s attentions—along the graceful line of his collarbone, and in the hollow of his throat.  Thor’s mouth drifted upward again to kiss his way down the soft exposed flesh of Loki’s inner arm to the dark fur beneath, where he paused to inhale the earthy musk of his sweat, the scent that was so uniquely, irreplaceably _his._   Finally he pressed his tongue to Loki’s nipple, coaxing it into a peak, and took it into his mouth to suck lightly, while Loki shifted and moaned softly beneath him.

Thor’s right hand, meanwhile, eased down the other side of Loki’s body, brushing lightly over his other nipple before stroking over the too-prominent lines of his ribs and coming to rest briefly at his hip.  Thor swept his hand down and inward, with a very particular aim in mind, but he paused when he felt a strange raised pucker of skin on Loki’s abdomen.  He took his mouth away from its task—Loki whined a bit in protest—and looked down at the mark beneath his fingers.  It was clearly a knife wound scar; Thor had one of his own, in almost exactly the same place.

“Loki, what—” he began, but Loki cut him off testily.  “I told you: I had an interesting year.  Can we leave it at that?”

Thor frowned, troubled, but said, “Yes, all right.”  He reached beneath the waistband of Loki’s trousers, wrapped his hand around Loki’s cock, now almost completely hard, and began to stroke it.  Loki sighed again, almost a moan, and arched his back slightly to lift his hips welcomingly toward Thor’s hand.  Thor moved back up to kiss Loki’s half-open mouth, pushing his tongue firmly between the parted lips, gasping slightly when Loki nipped at his lower lip in return.  He finally let go of Loki’s wrists to comb his fingers through his soft, wild hair, and Loki took the opportunity to run his hands roughly, greedily, over the muscles of Thor’s shoulders, his arms, his chest.  His hips bucked into Thor’s hand again, and then he was reaching to unlace Thor’s trousers, pushing them down, taking Thor’s cock into his hand to stroke it into full hardness.

Growing impatient, Thor took his hand from Loki’s hair and moved away from Loki’s hands to pull his trousers the rest of the way off—Loki bent his knees to speed the process—over his blood- and ink-stained feet, where the unevenly closed wound on his left sole already showed the inflamed pink beginnings of a scar.  Thor stripped his own trousers off as well, then reached over to the drawers by his bedside for a small jar of clear salve.  He scooped some into his fingers, then put his other hand on the inside of Loki’s thigh and pushed it gently to the side before reaching for his opening.

But Loki suddenly moved backward up the bed and swatted Thor’s hand away, saying brusquely, and with a strange note of fear in his voice, “No.”  Surprised, Thor looked up at Loki’s face, and saw that his brow was creased and his eyes shadowed with anxiety.

“What’s the matter?” he asked, puzzled and concerned.

“I want to be the one who enters you,” Loki purred, his eyelids lowered, clearly trying to cover his reaction of distress with a seductive air.

On the face of it, the request was unremarkable.  Although Thor’s instinct had been to resume their first and most frequent arrangement, they had sometimes switched roles during the years when they had been lovers; and if this was Loki’s preference, Thor had no objection.  But he had perceived the fearful aversion in Loki’s face and voice when Thor had moved to open him, and he was troubled by it.  “That’s fine, of course,” he said, careful to keep his voice patient and level.  “But why did you flinch away from me like that?  Did something happen?”  Thor’s mind was racing through possible explanations, and immediately latched onto the worst one he could imagine.  His voice trembling with horror that he tried badly to conceal, he asked, “Were you— did someone—?”

With a contemptuous expression that Thor thought looked somewhat half-hearted, Loki drawled, “No, Thor, no one _raped_ me.”  He articulated the word very pointedly, plainly rebuking Thor’s inability to say it.  “I just had a—an unfortunate experience.  Interesting year, remember.”

But Thor was not ready to let it go.  He doubted that Loki was being entirely honest, and wished that he would trust Thor with the truth—though he realized that, since he had just openly disavowed Loki as his brother, he hardly had the right to expect it.  Keeping his tone light, Thor remarked, “It must have been a very unfortunate experience indeed, to have frightened you away from something that you so used to enjoy.”

Loki’s expression of contempt was starting to look more genuine, and to mingle with annoyance.  “I never said I’d been _frightened away_ from anything permanently.  Give it time.”

Once again, Thor found his heart aching with sudden, foolish hope at Loki’s suggestion that this would not be the last time—that perhaps he was not planning a betrayal that would force Thor to kill him, or intending simply to vanish once they were gone from Asgard.  When they had first started doing this, almost ninety years ago, Loki would often insist that they should not continue, that they were sure to be caught, that this time must be their last; while Thor had been the one dropping subtle suggestions that there would always be a next time, secretly thrilling when Loki did not contradict him, hoping for the few times when Loki—perhaps only by unthinking mistake, but perhaps deliberately—let slip similar suggestions.

“And besides,” Loki continued, interrupting Thor’s reminiscences, “since my life and freedom are wholly in your power, it must be understandable that I should wish to hold the power in _some_ domain.”  As he spoke, he scraped the salve off Thor’s cupped fingers and with strategically placed taps of the backs of his hands to Thor’s thighs, indicated that he should crouch over Loki’s body with his hips raised so that Loki could reach his ass and coat his entrance with the salve.  “Which isn’t to say that I’m not perfectly willing to let you do most of the work,” he said playfully, by way of explaining why they had not switched places.

Thor was thoroughly disturbed by Loki’s assessment of the situation.  “This has never been about power, Loki,” he said, then gasped slightly as Loki’s first finger breached him—it had been years since anyone’s fingers had been inside him other than his own.

Loki laughed with amused surprise, and the sound was unexpectedly harsh.  “Your naïveté is charming, Thor, but I would have hoped that a thousand years of living would have cured you of it to _some_ degree.”  He added another finger while he was talking, and began gently to push at the tight ring of muscle around his fingers, to coax it wider.

Thor was anxious to rebut Loki’s troubling accusations, but found himself too distracted to think properly.  “Is that what you thought?  That I—” he gasped again as the tip of Loki’s finger brushed over the little knot of nerves inside him—“that I was asserting my _power_ over you?”

“Always, Thor, in the bedroom as everywhere else—in the training yards, on the battlefield, in the Council chamber.”  Where Thor might have expected bitterness and resentment—Loki’s sneer of _“I remember a shadow”_ echoed in Thor’s head _—_ Loki’s voice was strangely calm and matter-of-fact.

“I never meant—” Thor began, before breaking off with a sigh when a third finger entered him, the slight burning pain far outweighed by the pleasure of a fullness that was not yet nearly enough.

“Shhh, Thor, of course you didn’t,” Loki said soothingly, flexing his fingers to gradually stretch Thor’s resisting muscles, crooking one to press on the nerve center once more, making Thor shut his eyes and whimper through his tightly closed lips while his cock swelled further and began to leak.

“Urðr’s tits, Loki,” Thor burst out finally, “did you _have_ to start this conversation when your fingers were in my ass?”

Loki snorted.  “Would you rather have had it with my cock in your ass?”

“Possibly,” Thor retorted.

“Well, then,” said Loki, and reached over to where Thor had set down the jar of salve on top of the small chest of drawers.  First he smoothed a generous amount over his own cock, then slicked up Thor’s with what was left on his hand.  With his other hand on the small of Thor’s back, he slowly guided him down onto just the head of his cock, and then let Thor settle the rest of the way down when he was ready.

Thor breathed deeply, accustoming himself to the sudden stretch and fullness.  It was perfect, he realized, better than his own fingers or any other sort of half-measure could ever be, and not just for physical reasons (though he was quite as fond of the physical dimensions of Loki’s cock as he was of the rest of him), but because it was _Loki,_ and their bodies were joined as they were meant to be.  _Brother,_ he wanted to whisper, or perhaps to shout.  But he could not.  So he just began moving, slowly at first, then gradually picking up speed, feeling for the natural rhythm of Loki’s thrusts and adjusting himself to them, like a dancer following a partner.  He kept their hips pressed tightly together so that Loki was buried as deeply in him as he could be, so that they were joined as fully as possible.

Thor knew how to angle himself so that Loki’s cock would hit his prostate with each stroke, but he was not finished with the (extremely ill-timed) conversation that Loki had begun, and he did not wish to be any more distracted than necessary.  “And another thing: don’t you think it’s a bit—narrow-minded, and simplistic, to think that the one who does the penetrating must be the one who has the greater power?  I would not have expected that from _you,_ especially.”

Loki’s chuckle was fond, but more than a touch condescending.  “How very modern of you, Thor—but once again, I’m afraid, quite naïve.  Who knows better than the _seiðmaðr,_ followed everywhere by the whisper of _‘ergi,’_ that it is almost always seen as shameful for a man to take on a traditionally female role—as an ignominious abdication of his natural superiority?  A dangerous suggestion that there might be something valuable enough in femininity that a man would choose to emulate it?”

“But surely you don’t _believe_ that it’s shameful?” Thor insisted, leaning forward to grasp Loki’s wrists again and pin them to the bed, with his arms stretched out to the sides.

“Ah, we may think ourselves more enlightened, above the conceptions and misconceptions of our culture, but we never entirely escape them,” said Loki.

And then Thor felt the burning need to stop Loki’s mouth with his own—though whether it was because he was weary of Loki’s philosophizing, or because his desire was spurred on by this reminder of the philosophical-minded brother he had once known, he could not have said.  Still gripping Loki’s wrists, Thor leaned down further to kiss him hard, driving his tongue deep into Loki’s mouth, grasping at his lips with his teeth.  He lifted his hips to let Loki slide almost all the way out of him, then sank back down, finding the angle that allowed the head of Loki’s cock to brush the spot that seemed to spread a tingling fire through his whole body.  Loki struggled against the firm grip holding his wrists, apparently wanting to stroke Thor’s reddened cock, which was now leaking more copiously than ever.  But Thor was not ready to come, not yet; he wanted to make this last as long as he could, considering that this might be their last time together—perhaps for centuries to come, or perhaps forever.

Thor released Loki’s mouth at last, and still holding onto his wrists, he pulled them backwards so that he was lying on his back and Loki was poised above him.  “You have always held the power here, Loki,” he said hoarsely.  “You always held the power to refuse.  To leave me.”

“So did you,” Loki pointed out with a small, slightly nervous-sounding laugh, looking down at Thor with a strange apprehension in his eyes.

“But I never would have,” Thor said warmly.   _“And you did”_ went unspoken.

Although Loki’s hands were firmly planted on either side of Thor’s chest to hold himself up, Thor found himself still holding onto his wrists possessively—an eerie echo of the cuffs with which Loki had been bound when Thor brought him back to Asgard, a presaging of the cuffs that Thor even now had secreted in an inner pocket of his cloak.  It was as though even Thor’s hands knew that the only way to keep Loki with him was to hold him prisoner.  Not wanting to give the lie to his assurance that here, at least, he was not asserting his power over Loki, he made himself let go.  He slid his hands up Loki’s arms, admiring the lines of his lean, wiry muscles, flexed with the (mild) effort of supporting his weight.  He passed his hands over the sharp curves of Loki’s shoulders to caress his back—and then stopped when he felt something strange.  Smooth raised ridges of skin—scar tissue, unmistakably—in what felt like a crisscross pattern.  The kind of scar pattern produced by flogging.

Loki’s face had hardened.  “Don’t,” he said tightly.

“Loki—” Thor began, hardly knowing what he was going to say.

“Don’t,” Loki said again, louder, sharper, on the brink of anger.  “Don’t ask, don’t say anything, for Yggdrasil’s sake don’t _pity_ me.”

Loki’s cock was starting to go soft, and Thor could feel it beginning to slip out of him; but that was the least of his concerns at the moment.  He tried again, keeping his voice as gentle and unthreatening as he could, as if he were speaking to a cornered feral creature that was ready either to bolt or to bite.  “Loki, why won’t you tell me—”

“Because I’m not your brother, remember?” Loki snarled, cutting him off.  “Are you always so inquisitive about the personal histories of your whores?”

It was a cheap shot, and they both knew it, but Thor still felt as if he had been slapped.  “Loki, don’t,” he said, his voice low.

Loki’s face flushed and he at least had the grace to look slightly ashamed, but he didn’t back down.  “Oh no, I’m sorry, I was being imprecise.  This isn’t what you’re paying me for with a few hours of freedom, is it?  This is just how I’m showing my _gratitude_ for your patronage.”

Thor sat up, which caused Loki’s cock to slide the rest of the way out, and put his hand to the side of Loki’s face.  “I thought you wanted this as well,” he said quietly, looking firmly into Loki’s eyes.  His pupils had contracted again almost to their usual size, save for the dimness of the room, and his eyes were pale again, the lake hidden once more by its sheet of ice.

“I thought so, too,” Loki said coldly, “but you keep changing the terms of the arrangement.”

Ah, so that was it.  Loki was willing to sleep with Thor whether that meant making love to a brother to whom he meant everything or fucking a stranger to whom he meant nothing; but he needed to know which it was.

“Some things do not change,” Thor said again, slowly.  “In the ways that matter, I am as I ever was.”

Loki narrowed his eyes and scrutinized Thor’s face, and then something seemed to click into place behind his eyes.  He had realized the truth, or something close to it: that Thor still loved him, was still _in_ love with him, and it was Loki’s love that he doubted—indeed, had despaired of, and given up for lost—but that Thor wanted him all the same, and would settle for meaningless sex if that was all Loki would give him.

And now Loki held the advantage: Thor had shown his cards, but Loki’s still remained hidden close to his chest.  Thor had some suspicions about what was in his hand; it told him _something_ that Loki cared so much how Thor felt about him, and what he thought.  And all of Loki’s needling and cruel jabs—his petty, spiteful, all-too-successful efforts to cause Thor pain—told him something: malice was, at least, not indifference.  But still his feelings toward Thor, as well as his intentions, were mostly a mystery.  Even when Loki said in a dry, almost playful tone, “One day, perhaps, I’ll tell you all about my extremely interesting year—assuming we survive whatever idiotic plan you’ve concocted,” Thor could not be sure whether he was telling the truth.

Thor wished more than anything that they did not have to go to Svartalfheim, to save Jane and save the world.  He wished that he could stop time and keep Loki here with him, holding him and hearing the tales of how he came by all his scars, weeping with him if the story called for tears—but never weeping _for_ him, never _pitying_ him—kissing him until they forgot everything but the taste of each other.  But he did not have the time, as he had been reminding them—reminding himself—since they began; and he did not have Loki either, not really.  Loki was no longer his to keep, if he ever had been.

So he settled for just the kissing, just for a little while, open-mouthed and fierce and possessive, while he stroked Loki back to hardness and guided him back inside.  Thor did not lie back again, or push Loki back to rest on the pillows; they both stayed upright, their bodies pressed close together, Loki with his long legs folded into a cradle and Thor sitting on his lap with his legs wrapped around Loki’s hips and his fingers twined in his hair, while they kissed in rhythm with their thrusts.  Loki reached between them to stroke Thor’s cock, and they came—their soft cries muffled in each other’s mouths—at almost the same time, their bodies remembering the familiarity with each other that had taught them to do the same for years.

They stayed sitting together for a minute, their foreheads resting against each other as their breathing slowed, still wrapped around each other in what Thor could almost imagine was an embrace.  Then Loki’s softened cock slipped out of Thor again, and he waved a hand to vanish the come that was clinging to their bellies and dripping onto the bedding.  Thor was both sorry and grateful that Loki made the first move to pull away, to untangle his legs from Thor’s and stand up, because Thor might not have been able to bring himself to move otherwise.

“I’m going to wash, and you should probably do the same,” said Loki, suddenly all practicality again.  He disappeared into the bathing chamber adjoining Thor’s room—which made sense, Thor supposed, because the bathroom in Loki’s chambers probably wouldn’t have any soap or towels anymore, considering that the occupant was supposed to be dead.  Thor stayed in the bedroom to give Loki his privacy, which was probably foolish in light of what they had just done, not to mention the fact that they used to bathe together all throughout their youth.  It felt as if they were new lovers again, comfortable seeing each other’s skin only for the purpose of sex, but not in mundane contexts, like bathing and pissing, that seemed all the more intimate for their ordinariness.

When Loki re-emerged, his hair was straight and slicked back again.  Thor felt a strange pang of regret at that; Loki’s natural curls had softened him, somehow, made him seem more vulnerable, more honest.  “Your turn, brother,” Loki said briskly, apparently seeing nothing odd in the fact that Thor had waited for him.  “I’m going to go put on my armor now, and then you can explain this ingenious plan of yours.  Yes, I’ll go out the back way, and yes, I’ll make myself invisible,” he said with a touch of exasperation, just as Thor was opening his mouth to give him that exact advice.  Loki went through another interior door, from Thor’s bedroom into the sitting room behind it, and then Thor heard the slight creak of the wooden screen door that opened onto their shared balcony.

Thor quickly bathed and dressed, trying to think only about his plan, rehearsing all the details in his head so that he could explain it to Loki effectively, trying to think of any contingencies he had not considered or flaws he might have missed, trying _not_ to think any more about what had just happened.  They would talk about it later.  Later, Loki would tell him the stories behind all of his scars, and Thor would find a way to forgive him.  Thor would give Loki his seduction later, and they would be lovers again, not—whatever they were now.  This painful tangle of lovers, enemies, and strangers.  Perhaps they would be brothers again, too.  Thor realized that he did not mind that Loki still called him ‘brother,’ not (as he had thought) because it was pleasant to pretend it was still true, but because it _was—_ perhaps Loki was no longer Thor’s brother, but Thor was still Loki’s.

It became plain to him then, and not with the force of any great revelation, that he could not kill Loki, even if Loki did betray him.  He had been bluffing after all, and had not even known it himself—which, he reflected, was probably the most convincing kind of bluff.  He sincerely hoped that Loki would not call it.  But he wondered, seeing the strange lighthearted cheerfulness with which Loki strode down the hall beside him (after they had both dressed and gone over their parts in the plan), whether he knew.  Or perhaps it was only, as Loki had said, his contentment in the knowledge that his death, even at Thor’s hand, would not be Thor’s victory, but rather another way to cause his enemy pain.  His enemy who was also his brother, and who loved him.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic took forever to write and I'm not completely happy with how it turned out (and it's my first time writing anal sex...), so if anyone wants to offer constructive criticism, it is welcome. Reassurances that it's fine and I don't need to worry about it are also welcome, of course :-P
> 
> If you, like Thor, are curious about what happened during Loki's very interesting year (or at least my take on it), do check out [The Abyss Gazes Also](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5236796/chapters/12078722), which contains the explanations (some more vague than others) of most of the things that are brought up in this fic.


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